The second half of the article is arguably more interesting than the first: it covers Zappos' CEO's idea for increasing productivity with large numbers of employees.
I'll be very interested to see if his "city" experiment works.
I've worked at firms in suburban office parks, and I've worked at firms in downtown urban areas. I like the latter more, simply because you can walk to lunch and interact with people (sometimes they're the homeless, which is how I learned about Blue Leapers being a global threat to mankind...)
With the suburban offices, either I'm bringing my lunch, or I'm driving somewhere to go eat. In both cases I'm in a sensory bubble, and that's bad. So I think Tony's idea has a lot of validity.
Even more than that, every person I know who in their 20s and 30s would prefer to work in the city and either do a quick commute in via public transportation or live in the city. No one wants to have to get in a car and drive for 40 minutes. If they do, they justify it due to cost, not actual benefit.
The companies that get the best people are the one's located in downtown. That alone increases productivity.
The vast majority want to live in cities. It is proven quantitatively through rents rising much faster in all the dense areas of the US while suburban rents and prices have lagged.
Sure "Lots of people don't want to live or work in a large city." is technically correct, but pretty much every other person wants to be able to walk to work, walk to resturants and never have to touch a car except for trips outside where they live. That lifestyle doesn't exist when you work in office parks.
The only argument for living in the burbs is price. People say "I want a yard"... if you had the money you would have it in the city.
Sure, some people make tradeoffs and would rather have the yard, but most people I know move to the burbs because of price and justify it with the yard. Most of the top talent lives in cities.
I would be interested in analysis and discussion of this quantitative analysis.
I'm not sure we can say that youth wanting to move into cities is the main reason for rent increasing. That would seem to make a complex market far too simple.
The article is 2 years old, but cites 2010 US Census data which found:
The article observes that 25-34 year olds were also flocking to cities in the 90's, based on data from the 2000 Census. However,
"In the last ten years, [the 25-34 year-olds from 2000's] presence grew 12% in the suburbs and shrunk by 22.7% in "historic core cities," like New York and San Francisco, according to Joel Kotkin at Forbes."
This may suggest a nuance, where urban areas are attractive to people with little relative wealth (can always find "cheap" apartments) and exploratory social lives (not yet married / having kids). And it suggests that the drive isn't necessarily novel.
But given some money and changed social needs, the same people end up moving out to where they have more space and greater comforts.
Even here in Germany, the same trend is evident -- lots of young and old people in the city centers, and a lot more families and middle-aged people out in the lower-density areas.
The rent differential can be explained by nothing more than the natural dynamics of the situation. Want to live in a big city? Probably really want to live in NYC or SanFran, right? Whereas if you want to live "in the burbs", you can go pretty much anywhere. And if you want acreage, you have even more options (assuming you can telecommute).
Was that intended to be a serious response? "I know what people really want even if they say they want something else"? People being forced into cities quantitatively proves they want to be in cities?
More space, less crime, parking, cheaper rent or mortgage, cleaner air, quieter, more green spaces, and typically only a 20-30 minute drive from the city if you actually want to go to something big-metro-specific, like the opera/museum/theater/etc.
I generally agree, but recent planning movements have managed to produce suburban areas with centralized work/shop centers for the community giving lots of options for the suburban worker.
Something I've noticed working in a couple of city environments is that most of the variety of restaurants in the area I don't take advantage of anyway since their geared towards dinner patrons and/or are overpriced for the kind of quick lunch I want during the work day. So I usually end up boiling down an urban work area to a half dozen places to eat.
A suburb area I worked in before had twice that many with good lunch options within a 5 minute walk. A couple nearby office campuses require a short drive, but at least 2 dozen good lunch places to eat within a 5-10 minute drive.
In NY near the Flatiron, I have several thousand lunch options within a 5-10 minute walk/subway ride. Of course I tend to return to the ones I've had good experiences with, but unlike suburbs I get my fill of novelty in many ways other than just the food I select from some megastripmall.
Urban centers also offer a much richer after-work culture of independent films, theater, music, and general night life that can't be found in the suburbs.
I would definitely make some exceptions to my statement for NYC and other similarly dense cities. However, lower density cities, liked DC or Austin don't really offer anywhere near the variety.
Las Vegas seems like a challenging environment to make it work, but I think he's definitely on to something. I think this is why the technology scene in California pivoted to San Francisco. It's also what makes NYC promising. Seems most people would prefer to work in am urban core rather than in an office park.
I think it would be interesting to see corporate campuses follow dense residential trends and create multi-use buildings with the ground floor dedicated to publicly accessible restaurants, retail, etc. That would even help fund the project.
I too am intrigued by the move to SF away from the Peninsula/Valley. I think though it's a subset of the "Software eating the World" thesis. You can now build much bigger companies with fewer people who are younger (no middle management) and get them significantly further along. So you don't need that campus to house 1000 employees to build a $100 million company as in the past. It'll also be interesting to see if startups begin to leave SF if they really get big. I hope not, but am curious.
I know a large established company that did this and turned out to make more from the commercial property letting than their core business, which presents them with an interesting dilemma...
Agreed. Makes some intuitive sense. If we knew exactly what made things work, it would make sense to pick that environment. Since we clearly don't, it seems most of the limiting actions we take actually reduce the chances of finding that random walk that leads to success.
Agreed. I'd love to read more about the Zappos case study. I'd love to see how they've solved some of the finer challenges of attempting a work environment like this.
I'll be very interested to see if his "city" experiment works.